Hitler went to war with France and GB with no realistic prospect of winning. That's the major irrationality; close second was his cruelty to the subject nationalities in the USSR that turned them back to Stalin. Churchill did nothing on this scale (perhaps staying in the war alone was irrational; but he did have an empire to back him up, and plausible hope the USA would join in). Stalin... internally did a lot of stupid things, and trusted Hitler, but didn't commit massive external errors, and was often very prudent.

But Hitler just started war after war until one of them went badly for him.

Since most atheists, agnostics, etc, consider the First Amendment pretty important, we can assume they 'believe in religion'.

That's a pretty large logical leap. The First Amendment protects the right to speech and the right to petition government in addition to freedom of religion. Even if I accept Moldbug's assertion that religious ideology should be treated no different from other ideology, I can still think that the First Amendment is important.

It's hard to be the first to join a revolution, I agree. But should we really be making it easier for ourselves to be the lone dissenting voice in the woods? After all, most of those dissenting voices are just crazy; they don't have access to a greater truth, but they think they do. Maybe the difficulty of starting a revolution is a good thing -- it forces you to be really, really convinced in your idea.

In general the article was interesting. However the failures described seem to be related to lack of perspicacity more than to irrationality. If upper management are fooled by the middle managers’ signalling, they are not perspicacious enough and probably aren’t fit to be doing their jobs – training in rationality is unlikely to change that.

In the vast majority of failed projects I’ve been called to looked at, the managers have not read one book on software engineering. They haven’t taken one class, read one article, or been to one workshop. At best, they’ve managed other failing software projects.

This is not irrationality per se, but stupidity and incompetence.

Yes, businesses are under pressure to gravitate toward bad engineering practices, but shouldn’t they be under equal market pressure to compete against companies that are using actually good software engineering practices? Why sure, in the long run. But as Keynes succinctly put it, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” Eventually is a long time.

An alternative perspective is that extensive government intervention substantially reduces the market pressure that large companies experience. Here is Moldbug on the subject of Dilbertization (the government intervention he implies is its propping up of the maturity transforming banking system):

The late Communist world was a world in which it was often your job to do strange, useless things badly, all day, for no good reason at all.

There is another world in which it is often your job to do strange, useless things badly, all day, for no good reason at all. This is the world of Dilbert. Many of us have experienced it.

My theory is that Dilbert and Brezhnev are the same thing. I call it Dilbert-Brezhnev syndrome, or DBS. While we are certainly not the Soviet Union, my theory is that America has contracted a rather serious case of DBS.

The Soviet Union was a world in which business bore no relation to profit. People did strange, useless things badly because, lacking the discipline of profit that enforces efficiency, they succumbed to ulterior motives. Their unprofitable enterprises, purportedly businesses, were in fact patronage structures.

America is a much more interesting case, because (aside from its endlessly burgeoning political system, including its grant-funded "nongovernmental" periphery), the industries in which we see Dilbert syndrome are private, profitable. Nothing in America today is Brezhnev bad, but it is getting there. [...]

The answer, I think, is our friend zombie finance. We do not have Gosplan, but we have Wall Street. America is Dilbertized to the extent that Wall Street is zombified.

Let's take the loans that created the housing bubble. These were zombie loans to a T. So, for example, Steve Sailer asks: where was capitalism? Why wasn't anyone betting against these loans, and driving them down to their true value?

The answer is that the free market bears very little relationship to the process that distributed these loans. [...]

My feeling is that American zombie finance is largely responsible for the appearance of DBS in the New World. Why is the country covered with hideous developments, strip-malls and chain stores? Because it has, or had, a financial system designed to finance these things. Many of us would prefer a Ritual to a Starbucks and a Joe's Diner to a Burger King, but the chains have an unbeatable advantage: it is much easier for them to get a loan. [...]

Starbucks is subject to the discipline of profit - but it is not as subject as it should be, because its sheer size gives it access to zombie money. Thus the generic can defeat the specific, blandness outcompetes character, and we drink charred cat hair rather than coffee.

California will implement austerity measures similar to the ones currently being implemented by European countries: 80%.

The bubble underlying the current Chinese boom will collapse: 35%.

Some European country will abandon the Euro: 20%.

It's just a little airborne, it's just a little airborne, it's still good!

• Homer Simpson (referring to a roast pig experiencing a series of diverting events)

My analysis is here.

Landsburg doesn't seem to be thinking about risk aversion - which is what the whole concept of a diverse portfolio depends upon. Maybe risky propositions are less common for charities than for investments - since charities like to offer people a sure thing. However, there are certainly some "long-shot" charities out there.

Is this a restatement of the circular argument fallacy?

Interestingly (and somewhat to the author's surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won't work.

Also interestingly, there appear to be no published technical articles that claim that it will.

Last week, I searched for articles on how mammalian cryopreservation is done. I found nothing. Not a single journal article on any of the techniques Alcor uses. There are many articles on cryopreserving sperm, and embryos; there are studies on attempting to preserve other types of tissue samples. But I could not find a single article on methods to attempt to cryopreserve adult mammals. Not even in the journal Cryobiology, which is entirely about cryopreservation.

Go to the current issue of Cryobiology and look at the article titles to see what actually is being done in the field. Also notice that the author names are almost all Asian and (non-English/French/German) European. Cryonics for humans is most popular in nations that don't publish on cryonics. (Don't know if it's popular in the Nordic countries.)

Um... if a rock was capable of fulfilling my every need, including a need for interaction with real people, I'd probably spend a lot of time around that rock.